Hewlett Packard Enterprise Teams With Microsoft Azure on Hybrid Cloud

Hewlett Packard Enterprise says it has inked a partnership with Microsoft that will make the software giant’s Azure cloud computing service the preferred public cloud portion in its deals for hybrid cloud products.

HPE, the world’s largest vendor of server computers, has been strongly promoting the hybrid cloud concept since walking away from a plan to create its own public cloud service earlier this year. A hybrid cloud combines the use of a public cloud service like Azure, Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud with computing capacity that the customer owns.

Companies in the market for cloud services are said to like the ability to mix and match their computing capacity with different combinations of public and private infrastructure. They’re too uncomfortable — or in the case of some regulated industries, legally unable — to allow certain data to go out to the public cloud. In other cases the public cloud can be used to add short-term capacity when demand spikes for brief periods.

The pair introduced a product called a hyper-converged system, which is basically an HPE ProLiant server adapted to put Azure in the customer’s data center. Azure support will also be added to every HPE server, which will make it one of the default options for using the public cloud. HPE will also certify 5,000 of its own employees on running Azure.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.